In the Service of the Shogun Frederik Cryns
Event details
In 1600, English helmsman William Adams washed ashore in Japan and was interrogated by Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan’s most powerful warlord and soon-to-be shogun. Far from executing Adams as a pirate, Ieyasu made him one of his most trusted advisers.
Frederik Cryns, author of In the Service of the Shogun, traces Adams’s remarkable rise from humble pilot to a position of immense influence in Japan’s foreign relations. He unravels the subsequent diplomatic manoeuvres of the Western powers in the shogun’s empire and Adams’s eventual downfall.
Join Frederik as he tells the authentic story of Adams’s chequered life in its historical context, taking us on a compelling journey into Adams’s complex inner feelings and cosmopolitan heart.
This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
About the speaker
Frederik Cryns is Professor of Japanese History at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan. He is the author of several bestselling books in Japanese on the early interaction of the Western world with Japan. In addition to his academic work, Frederik appears regularly on Japanese television history programmes and supervised the historical aspects of the television series ShÅgun (2024). Available now in hardback, In the Service of the Shogun: The Real Story of William Adams, will be published in paperback later this year by Reaktion.
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